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Things to do this week in NYC Jan 15-Jan 22: Museums

Some of the world's most impressive museums and exhibits are in New York?including the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and (of course) the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the great things to do in NYC is to visit these spectacular collections. Whether you're a native New Yorker or here on vacation, NYC's museums have something new and interesting to offer everybody! Here is a list of what's going on this week at museums throughout New York City.

This special exhibit tells the story of the 1967 Apollo 1 tragedy when, during routine tests, fire engulfed the command capsule and took the lives of astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. Through rare photographs, artifacts and narrative, the exhibit explores this pivotal event, which riveted the attention of a heartbroken nation, set new standards of heroism and service to our country and changed the course of space exploration in America.

After more than 30 years, the record-breaking exhibition, King Tut, returns to NYC for its final stop before these ancient treasures return to Egypt forever. Revel in the splendor of the ancient Egyptian world as you view a dazzling array of possessions unearthed from his tomb, along with antiquities representing his family and contemporaries. The exhibition is open 7 days a week: Sun.-Wed., 10am-8pm; Thurs.-Sat., 10am-9:30pm. Last admission is 90 minutes prior to closing. Last admission is 90 minutes prior to closing.

6:30–9 pm. Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, first floor. Free with cash bar. Imagine the complexity of chess at speeds of up to 100 miles an hour. This is table tennis -- also known as ping pong -- a game in which strategic decisions are made with split-second timing. Join us for an evening focused on the science and skill of table tennis and discover how the brain benefits from this simple game. Improve your skills with instruction by pros from SPiN, New York's only table tennis social club. Meet a few aficionados, including actor Susan Sarandon and puzzle master Will Shortz, as well as a few ranking champions.

6:30 pm.
Kaufmann Theater, first floor.
$15 ($13.50 Members, students, senior citizens).
Neuroscientist Paul Glimcher of New York University and Rob DeSalle, curator of Brain: The Inside Story, will discuss the interdisciplinary field of neuroeconomics, which melds psychology, economics, and neuroscience to study the mechanics of decision making and intuition. Among other topics, Glimcher and DeSalle will discuss how the brain enables us to evaluate decisions, categorize risks and rewards, and interact with each other.
Presented in conjunction with Brain: The Inside Story

A small, scholarly focused exhibition of about fifty pieces of the distinctive "artistic furniture" and related objects produced by the workshop of Charles Rohlfs (American, 1853-1936) in Buffalo, New York. His unusually inventive forms and imaginative carving combined many influences, from the abstract naturalism of Art Nouveau to the bold forms of the Arts and Crafts movement. The exhibition explores Rohlfs's work in the context of new research that reveals his success in Europe as well as in America, and traces his influence on other twentieth-century furniture designers. The exhibition draws from many public and private collections.

As part of the Culture Spot designation, the museum will offer a two-for-one savings on admission throughout the month and 10% off purchases in the museum’s book and gift shop. The two-for-one savings on admission at the American Folk Art Museum is valid January 1–31, 2011. Coupons and additional details about the special offer will also be available at nycgo.com/culturespot starting January 1, 2011.

Themes of dislocation and displacement in contemporary photography are explored in this exhibition of works from the collection. Perambulations and digressions in photographic works from the 1960s and 1970s by Vito Acconci, Ed Ruscha, Richard Long, and On Kawara, and a 1968 video by Bruce Nauman, show how a work of art -- cut loose from any specific medium or physical requirements -- could take the form of a walk, a 20–foot–long book, or a rigorously nonsensical pattern of movements.

Icelandic artist Katrin Sigurdardottir (b. 1967) created two site-specific sculptural installations for the Museum's series of solo exhibitions featuring the work of contemporary artists at mid-career.

In its early decades the Museum played a significant role in establishing photography as a modern art form. At the same time MoMA was integrating photography into innovative installation designs, blurring distinctions between photo-graphs as art objects and as communications media. In this exhibit, books, periodicals, installation photographs, and examples of actual exhibition design illustrate how diverse developments in twentieth-century photography were mobilized to explain, disseminate, and promote modernism.

During the period from the end of World War I to Hitler's becoming Chancellor, German filmmaking was rich in stylistic and narrative innovation, and internationally influential. This show celebrates the period with posters and film stills drawn from the collections of MoMA and the Deutsche Kinemathek, Museum fur Film und Fernsehen, Berlin, as well as a selection of graphically striking presentation books from Germany's UFA film studio, acquired in 1937 by the Museum's founding film curator Iris Barry. Closed Tues.

For much of photography's 170-year history, women have expanded its roles by experimenting with every aspect of the medium. Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography presents a selection of outstanding photographs by women artists, charting the medium's history from the dawn of the modern period to the present. Including over two hundred works, this exhibition features celebrated masterworks and new acquisitions from the collection by such figures as Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Imogen Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra, Florence Henri, Roni Horn, Nan Goldin, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Lucia Moholy, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others. The exhibition also highlights works drawn from a variety of curatorial departments, including Bottoms, a large-scale Fluxus wallpaper by Yoko Ono.

Among Warhol's cinematic oeuvre, the black-and-white silent films are the most daring and experimental in their selection of subject and theme, psychological acuity, rhythmic pacing, and sheer beauty of form. Although these films were originally shot at sound-film speed (twenty-four frames per second), Warhol specified that prints be projected at a slower speed of sixteen frames per second, a rate used in the projection of silent films from the 1890s through the 1920s. For this exhibition, a selection of Warhol's films made between 1963 and 1966 has been transferred from 16mm film to DVD at the speed of sixteen frames per second, and projected onto screens and monitors in a gallery setting. Thus it is again possible to see the works as Warhol intended, and to appreciate the ways in which he challenged and provoked both subject and viewer in his manipulation of moving images.

This display of drawings, prints, and illustrated books in the Johnson Galleries offers a rich presentation of artists' portraits and self-portraits, both drawings and prints, dating from the early sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Among the highlights are: a self-portrait by the Northern Renaissance master Simon Bening, showing the artist in his light-filled studio, interrupting work on a manuscript page pinned to his desk as he removes his eyeglasses to peer at the viewer; Rembrandt's etched self-portrait, in which he dons the elegant attire and refined, self-possessed attitude of a Renaissance courtier; and Seurat's masterful and monumental study, rendered with the silken, dark tonality of his favorite graphic medium, Conté crayon, of his friend and fellow painter Aman-Jean, absorbed in his artistic labor.

Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time traces the development of realism in American art between 1900 and 1940, emphasizing the diverse ways that artists depicted the sweeping transformations in urban and rural life that occurred during this period. The exhibition highlights the work of Edward Hopper, whose use of the subject matter of modern life to portray universal human experiences made him America's most iconic realist painter of the 20th century.

This exhibition features three giants of photography -- Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), Edward Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg, 1879–1973), and Paul Strand (American, 1890–1976) -- whose works are among the Metropolitan's greatest photographic treasures. The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of approximately 115 photographs, drawn entirely from the collection.

The 1910s -- a period remembered for "The Great War," Einstein's theory of relativity, the Russian Revolution, and the birth of Hollywood -- was a dynamic and tumultuous decade that ushered in the modern era. This new age -- as it was captured by the quintessentially modern art of photography -- is the subject of this eclectic centennial exhibition devoted to photography of the 1910s.

Drawn entirely from the Museum's vast holdings, Abstract Expressionist New York underscores the achievements of a generation that catapulted New York City to the center of the international art world during the 1950s, and left as its legacy some of the twentieth century's greatest masterpieces. Galleries on the fourth floor present Abstract Expressionist paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, films, and archival materials in a display subtitled The Big Picture, marking the first time in the history of the new Museum building that a full floor has been devoted to a single theme. The exhibition continues on the floors below, where focused shows -- Rock Paper Scissors in the second-floor Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries, and Ideas Not Theories in the third-floor Drawings Galleries -- reveal distinct facets of the movement as it developed in diverse mediums, adding to a historical overview of the era and giving a sense of its great depth and complexity. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication.

Filippino Lippi is one of the great artists of fifteenth-century Florence. Among his principal patrons was the wealthy banker Filippo Strozzi (1428-1491), who commissioned a Madonna and Child for his villa at Santuccio, west of the city. This painting was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum by Jules Bache in 1949. In preparation for an exhibition on the artist that will be held in Rome next year, the picture was taken to conservation for examination this fall. A test cleaning revealed that beneath a thick, discolored varnish there was a beautifully preserved, richly colored painting. So striking is the transformation that the picture seems a new acquisition. This exhibition celebrates the restoration with a focused presentation that will include the picture and a number of objects in the Museum's permanent collection that can be associated with the Strozzi by their coat of arms, which has three crescent moons. The objects include a textile, a wooden chair, a cassone, and a column capital from the Palazzo Strozzi -- the grandest of all fifteenth-century palaces in Florence.

An unprecedented exhibition exploring the broad spectrum of contemporary African art, design, and craft worldwide. Featuring the work over 100 artists working in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean, The Global Africa Project surveys the rich pool of new talent emerging from the African continent and its influence on artists around the world. Through ceramics, basketry, textiles, jewelry, furniture, and fashion, as well as selective examples of architecture, photography, painting, and sculpture, the exhibition actively challenges conventional notions of a singular African aesthetic or identity, and reflects the integration of African art and design without making the usual distinctions between "professional" and "artisan." Closed Mon.

Vertical Urban Factory surveys more than 30 projects, including canonic examples of Modernism and new or recycled industrial architecture. The installation features over 200 photographs, diagrams, and drawings. Nine architectural models created for the exhibit using state-of the-art computer fabrication highlight a progressive design and construction. A series of films by documentary filmmaker Eric Breitbart use historical and contemporary footage to immerse the gallery visitor in the environment of conveyors systems and industrial processes. Hours: Noon-6pm, Wed.–Sun.

This exhibit surveys more than 30 projects, including canonic examples of Modernism and new or recycled industrial architecture. The installation features more than 200 photographs, diagrams, and drawings.

A Song for the Horse Nation presents the epic story of the horse's influence on American Indian tribes from the 1600s to the present. Drawing upon a treasure-trove of stunning historical objects -- including ledger drawings, hoof ornaments, beaded bags, hide robes, paintings, and other objects -- and new pieces by contemporary Native artists, the exhibition reveals how horses shaped the social, economic, cultural, and spiritual foundations of American Indian life, particularly on the Great Plains.

This unprecedented journey through the essential bundle of neurons that is the human brain offers insight through a sensory feast of imaginative art, vivid brain scan imaging, and thrilling interactive exhibits. Features include a "Brain Lounge," where you can view colorful, functional brain scans -- or fMRIs -- of two musicians, a NY Knick, and a U.N. translator. Open daily. $16; children 2-12, $9.

This installation features a selection of one hundred examples of important boxes, caskets, and small chests from the Metropolitan Museum's European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department. For centuries, boxes, caskets, cabinets, and chests played an important role in everyday life. Ranging from strongboxes to travel cases and from containers for tea or tobacco to those for the storage of toiletries or silverware, these lidded pieces were made in a large variety of shapes and sizes, and of many different materials. The form and decoration of these objects not only reflect changes in social customs and manners but also follow the stylistic developments in Europe over four hundred years. Pieces made of tortoiseshell, carved and veneered wood, porcelain, hard stones and natural substances, embroidery, various metals, leather, enamel, pastiglia, and straw will be included. These objects, some of which have not been on display for years, were much more than mere containers and often became precious works of art, collected in their own right.